The found chicken found

It is raining steadily. I am looking Tarkovsky's chicken straight in the eye. Both of us are many thousand years' distant from where we belong, and each is as startled by the familiar as the other. But of all the animals, the chicken's love of commodity music is the most remarked upon. Presently, we listen to Love Child. The chicken is not particularly affected by the line, 'I knew the way it felt to always live in doubt', but I am. I discover, and not for the first time, that there exists a few inches beyond the bounds of this world an inexhaustible well of impersonal benevolence. I am also confirmed in the suspicion that this well may be drawn upon for only two and half minutes at a time. We are both soothed by the music from the radio; I watch the chicken's eye closing very slowly. We are becoming detached from what has detached us. The city sycamore above us is caught in an agony of spring. The accident of our meeting has realigned us, and rain is the common substance of our world. 'In saecula saeculorum'. It was ever thus. He said, 'Know that the only wretchedness is wretchedness before God; And without wretchedness there may be science but no perception.' The rain pulverises cherry blossom beneath its torrents. Dampness begins to seep in, and with it the cold. Everything corrects and is corrected. There is return. Caught in the romance of the rain, I consider starting a mimeographed nihilist communist industrial workers' bulletin. The chicken kills another slug.